Please Do Not Disturb

by Robert Glancy

  Jesus! I didn’t have a passport. I was never going to make it over any border without my passport. And so my panicked plan to break for the border fell completely to pieces. And I knew I had to return to town, see Stella, pick up my passport then ride, either with or without her, via some dirt road that was hopefully not festooned with soldiers stoned out of their minds and armed to the teeth.

  But before I turned around, my motorbike made a terrific choking noise, lurching so sharply to a stop I nearly flipped over the handlebars. Out of fuel. Lights twinkled in the dusk ahead and I pushed my bike towards them. When I arrived at the lights, there was nothing but a jetty and some shacks with a sign: Port Tembo. There was, however, a bar. I went inside where all eyes fell on me. As a bar aficionado, from the majestic to the dingy, it was immediately apparent that this place was off the seedy scale. A few fellas were face-down on their tables, which were old wooden crates. The bar itself was just a stolen Coca-Cola billboard balanced on oil drums. It was a forlorn place of men who shared bad habits and the burden of heavy debts. It made the Flamingo look like the Ritz. The bar lady laughed and said, ‘Mazungu.’ That won a few giggles and I said, ‘Yes yes, I’m a white man, no hiding that. Would I be able to use your telephone?’

  On the bar, like a museum piece, sat a Bakelite telephone. I found a few coins in my pocket and gave them to her. As I turned the circular dial the men in the bar trained their blasted eyes on me.

  Beauty, the receptionist, answered. ‘Good evening, the Mirage, how may I help?’

  ‘Beauty, it’s Sean.’

  ‘Muli bwanji, Mr Sean,’ she said, her voice like some happy song from a past life before I was beaten by pimps and shot at by soldiers.

  ‘I need to talk to Stu, can you get him?’

  ‘Eh but Master Johnson he is so busy. Can I be taking a message?’

  I considered the message: Dear Stu. There’s going to be a coup. Run! Love Sean.

  ‘Is Fiona there?’

  ‘Eh but everyone is running around all over the places.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘I think I have just told you about it,’ said Beauty.

  ‘Is anyone there?’

  ‘I am here,’ she replied, brightly.

  ‘Look, Beauty, find Stu and tell him. Tell him . . .’ my voice lowered to a whisper ‘ . . . the praying mantis is coming.’

  Without a scintilla of suspicion, as if white men always spoke in code, she said, ‘OK, Mr Sean, thanks for calling.’

  I put down the phone and asked the bar lady, ‘When’s the next bus to town?’

  ‘No buses for three days because of Big Day.’

  I sensed people encroaching upon me, so I turned and said hello. They laughed in a strange way as the bar lady said, ‘They want to help you stay here.’ Noticing a commotion building behind the wall of men, I craned my neck, but they blocked me as one of them explained, ‘We’re friends, my friend. Stay in my house and we shall be friends.’ But when he placed a heavy arm on me, another man warned me, ‘This man is a bad man! But I am your friend, my friend. I give good price. You stay with me.’

  I gently pushed them back and said to the lady at the bar, ‘I need a real drink.’

  She handed me a waxy carton of Chibuku. Throwing my last coins down, I took a sip of the rancid stuff and they laughed as I gagged. They stood awkwardly close, this sloppy audience of drunks, staring at me with cold and disconcerting candour. In an attempt to lighten the tension, I raised my carton and said, ‘Cheers, fellas,’ but a man grabbed my arm, shouting, ‘These are bad men but I am safe.’

  I pulled away from him but someone slapped me and – before I could register if it had really happened – someone hit my hand, causing the carton to burst on the floor. ‘Get back,’ I heard myself shout, as fresh scratches ran down my arm and they laughed like demented children. In an animal panic, I shoved and squeezed through a tunnel of them, breaking out into the street, and there – where my motorbike had been – was a mess of footprints and the tracks of my wheels snaking off into the bush. ‘Where the fuck’s my bike?’ This provoked an eruption of more demented laughter, and as they thickened around me I saw the sum total of my life reduced to a headline: Paddy slain in Bwalo. The oddest things strike you when you’re about to die. Africa is a continent brimming with cautionary tales and I remembered when I told a mate I was going, he joked, ‘Careful, Sean. I knew this fella had a friend went there and he was drugged and killed, then this witch doctor brought him back to life, just so they could kill him all over again.’ Strange stories crowded in as the men plucked at my pockets. The bike was just the start. Once they knew I didn’t have two tambalas to rub together, things would get really ugly. I’d be sliced up and tossed into the port to join the other pale bones down there in the silt.

  We’re programmed to believe in our own immortality but eventually it’s tested and here I was in a situation bigger than myself, screaming and flailing about punching air. I fell, the floor rushing up to smack me in the face, and as I curled into a defensive knot, sharp kicks taking divots out of my back, a crisp light cut through the crowd. The men shielded their eyes, giving me time to unfurl, crouch low as a bull and charge a hole through them, tumbling out towards the light. The blaze came from the headlights of a truck and I didn’t care who was in there, could’ve been the devil himself, I was getting in.

  The driver was a thin man with snowy hair, who looked at me and deadpanned, ‘Need a lift, son?’

  The bad men cowered in the light but a persistent one came to my window. ‘Friend, don’t go. Do not go with this man, he’s a bad man.’

  I shouted, ‘Fuck off,’ and tried to wind the window but it jammed. The driver said something in Chichewa and the man slinked back to the bar.

  For a time we drove in silence, me quietly checking my arms and legs for cuts, until the man said, ‘What in God’s name were you doing there?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘It’s a long drive,’ he said and I shouted, ‘Wait a minute! Is that a Cork accent?’

  ‘’Tis? Well, ’twas once, I suppose.’

  ‘Two Cork men in a truck in the middle of nowhere. oia, man, oia!’

  ‘He works in mysterious ways.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, you’re damn right there,’ I said, feeling the elation of my escape. ‘Fuck. Felt a little dicey in that bar. Sure I’d have been fine, though.’

  Looking ahead, the lights of his truck carving out the dark, he said very seriously, ‘That place is the end of the road for most of those guys, highest murder rates in the country. They’d have torn you apart and fed you to the crocodiles.’

  I took a moment – a sharp aftershock of panic ran through me – before I said, ‘Well what were you doing there?’

  He reached over me and popped the glove compartment open. I flinched, thinking he was pulling a gun. Inside was a white collar smiling under the light. I picked it up and I suddenly clicked. ‘Jesus Christ, you’re a priest.’

  ‘Paul’s my name.’

  Immediately falling into altar-boy mode, I confessed, ‘Sorry, Father, for taking the Lord’s name in vain and for all of that stuff and, my goodness, I mean, saved by a Catholic priest. Wow. Like, do you think God is trying to tell me something?’

  ‘Food for thought, certainly.’

  ‘Right you are, Father,’ I said. ‘So what brought you to the port of no return?’

  Slowly, reluctantly, he replied, ‘Well, last night a man came asking for shelter. I turned him away. I often take people in, you see, put them up, give them breakfast, but this man scared me or I wasn’t in a charitable mood. Whatever the reason, I sent him into the night, and soon as I did it ate me up. Felt guilty all day. Last night my heart was cold, so I went in search of repentance and there you were being eaten by the wolves.’

  I didn’t talk for a long time, just watched the headlights stretch ahead, thinking. I’m a lapsed Catholic but sitting there I felt something. Not God, certainly not proof of the wort
h of organised religion, but I felt a force that, for a brief moment, was working in my favour. This was my crossroads and I knew what to do. I was going to tell Stu what I’d heard; he could do with it what he wanted. I was going to tell Stella we needed to give our relationship another go. Then we were going to start afresh in Zambia, or Kenya. And finally, even if I died trying, I was going to write my second book.

  I was so lost to my thoughts that the Father had to jab my ribs to get my attention. We were stopped. He pointed through the window. ‘Walk as an arrow flies through the field till you hit sand. Des’s place. Tomorrow Des will ride you to town. It’s a backpacking place. There’ll be a carload of them wanting to see the Big Day. So you can hitch a lift.’

  God it made me feel like a kid again but I had to ask: ‘I’m ashamed to request even more of a man who’s already saved my skin, but Father is there any way I could bludge a kwacha or two?’ He went into his pocket, pulled out some notes and I promised, ‘I’ll post you the money back. Give me your address and . . .’

  ‘Rubbish you will. Cork men are bad liars. Take the money, God be with you.’

  I leaned over and hugged him. He tried to wiggle out of it but I held on tight and I noticed his right ear was missing, nothing there but a hole. ‘Father, listen,’ I said. ‘I don’t know exactly what’s going on but something bad is about to happen, possibly to Tafumo and others. I suggest you try and get out of the country before it’s too late.’

  Staring straight ahead, nodding as if he heard such things every day, he replied, ‘He was always in trouble, that Tafumo. God be with you, son,’ and drove off.

  Bar the stars, all I saw was black to the left, right, top and bottom of me. Riding the high from my rescue, without a worry in the world, I tramped into the oily night, strolling through the rows of maize, right into another pit of uncertainty as the great scale of nature swelled about me, animals screaming and squawking to a terrifying crescendo. My smile hardened as I thought: maybe those drunkards at the port weren’t so bad, maybe they’d just have cut off a finger but still cooked me breakfast in the morning and sent me on my way. Maybe this was worse, to be found dead, killed by a pack of lucky lions that happened to be strolling by. But as fear took hold, up ahead I saw lines of lights doing a dim impression of the stars. I jogged, hoping they’d get bigger, but they didn’t. All of which made me feel as though I wasn’t moving at all, just jogging on the spot, stuck in treacle, until finally my feet crunched against sand and I saw what they were: strings of Christmas lights set into the thatch of a bar. Des’s place.

  I’d escaped death, found God, and was somehow in a bar full of Scandinavian men who all looked like Axl Rose, drinking beers like the world was coming to an end. And maybe it was. After the greatest five beers any Irishman ever drank, I met Des, gave him some of the money that the Father had given me, and he set me up with a sleeping bag and a small tent into which I crawled and proceeded to sleep like the dead.

  Josef

  I rang Ruby. ‘Are you safe?’

  ‘Yes, master, no one is here but Solomon, myself and Ezekiel.’

  ‘Don’t put down the phone, Ruby, leave it on, leave it on!’ I placed the phone on the dash and drove, occasionally shouting, ‘Still there?’ hearing her small voice call back, ‘Yes, master, we are safe.’

  I cut the headlights, then parked the car in the bush. I walked, holding the phone to my ear, hearing Ruby breathing. I looked back at the palace, so brightly lit that the fields around it shone in its ivory glow. When I got to the mango tree I touched it. I took out my folder and looked at it for the last time, thinking of all the things Essop had told me, things I hated hearing because I knew them all to be true. Here is my mbiri, my report, my story. Terrible to think that this small folder represented more truth about me than all the words I’d ever spoken to everyone I loved. From my pocket I took out a small wooden London bus I’d once carved for Hope back when she accompanied Tafumo on a trip to England, back when life was sweet. I considered what Essop had said about the economy of the Chichewa language. The English have many words for guest, each one carefully distinguishing the character of the guest, whether they be a relative, some sort of refugee, a friend, stranger or enemy. But in Chichewa we use just one word, mlendo, which offers no detail as to whether they are someone to be welcomed, invited in, rejected, someone to be loved or feared. And in all its multiplicity, that word is exactly what I am; I am a mlendo, a refugee, a guest and a threat.

  Deep scars ran down the bark of the tree, reminding me of Hope’s intricate braids. Sometimes late at night or just before I woke in the morning, I remembered them. My fingers, the slim muscle within, remembered the weight of her braids, the sensation of them slipping through my hands and the warmth that radiated from her head. I slid my folder deep inside the tree, placed the bus on it and stood there just a moment longer, imagining Hope. I didn’t see her as the old Hope of today; I saw her briefly and clearly as a young woman, looking up at me with tears in her eyes, our wedding ring shining in the sun, the two of us hugging as we returned home, planning our lives and laughing, as if the rest of the world were merely a backdrop to our love. I made my way back to the car. I placed the phone on the seat beside me, shouting, ‘I’m coming, keep the phone on.’

  When I returned, Ezekiel was still standing to attention, as if he had not moved, his panga in one hand, his other resting on his gun. He opened the gates and I nodded as he turned and quickly closed them. I went into the sitting room; only one light was on in the corner, near the bookshelf where I saw Solomon was sleeping on the sofa. Poor Ruby sitting next to him with a carving knife in one hand and the phone in the other. I handed Ruby an envelope with money. ‘Ruby, it is time for you to go, return to your village and stay there until the dust settles.’

  Roused from his sleep, Solomon stood and hugged me. Ruby didn’t ask any questions, she simply nodded at me, then she grabbed Solomon and gave him an awkward hug. He instinctively struggled against it, still half-asleep, confused. She broke the hug and placed her hand on his head and held it there as Solomon let out a little grumble.

  ‘Solomon, listen,’ I said softly. ‘Run to your room and grab some clothes, only one bag, put what you need in a bag, we’re going.’ He looked angry, still sleepy, wanting to ask questions, but I shoved him towards his room. ‘Go! Now!’

  Ruby went with him and I heard them packing and muttering together, deciding what to take, what to leave. I went to my room and grabbed my emergency bag, full of passports, money and clothes. When I got back to the sitting room, Solomon was standing with his school backpack. Ruby was crying quietly as we got to the front door. Then I ran to the gate and looked through the bars; there was a car, a few metres up the road, waiting.

  ‘Ezekiel, come with me,’ I said. Solomon and Ruby looked confused as they followed us back into the house. I took Ezekiel into the bedroom and said, ‘Take off your uniform.’ Solomon and Ruby stood in the doorway looking scared. I grabbed my best suit from the wardrobe and handed it to Ezekiel. ‘Get into this.’ He nodded and stepped into the bathroom. When he emerged he was smiling; the suit was far too small for him, the jacket sleeves stopping abruptly just below his elbows and his sharp ankles jutting out under the trouser legs. Ruby said, ‘Very handsome, Ezekiel,’ and we all laughed as Ezekiel stood uncomfortably fidgeting with the suit.

  ‘Now listen, Ezekiel,’ I explained as I tied a tie around his neck. ‘They’re following us so I need you to drive my Mercedes. Can you drive?’ He nodded and I continued. ‘Drive it all around town, don’t go near roadblocks and after you have driven for an hour or so take the car out to the airport, leave it there in the car park, then you must go home, to your home, to your village. Don’t come back. Take a bus from the airport. Here is some money for it.’

  I handed him his envelope thick with notes. ‘This is too much, master,’ he said and I shoved it back in his hand. ‘No it’s not. Now if anyone stops you just tell them you are dropping the car at the airport on my be
half. You are under my employment so you will be fine. Do you understand?’ He nodded and I said, ‘Now wear these shoes,’ and I gave him my newest shoes, shiny as glass, which he looked at and, as if it was just a little too much to take, shook his head and said, ‘No, master, not your shoes, I cannot.’

  So Ezekiel sunk his huge feet into his Wellington boots, my suit straining against his body like a shrunken school uniform, and we all crept down to the garage. I handed Ezekiel the key to the Mercedes. ‘Drive carefully; drop Ruby wherever she wants to go. Don’t stop for anyone unless you’re forced to. Keep them off my tail as long as possible.’ Ezekiel shook his head, as if he simply could not take the keys of this precious car. ‘Take it, it’s an order!’ I snapped and when he came to attention I heard the plastic clap of his wellies tapping together.

  As I explained to Ezekiel how an automatic gearshift worked, Ruby ran to the kaya and brought back two bags, the sum total of her and Ezekiel’s lives stuffed inside them. She threw them in the car and then gave Solomon a last hug. This time he didn’t resist but hugged her back. I was helping Ezekiel push back the seat so his large frame fitted comfortably, and when I turned Ruby was standing waiting in front of me. I held out my hand. She shook it and I said, ‘Thank you for . . . taking such good care of us,’ and she got into the passenger seat.

  Ezekiel moved the steering wheel a bit then nodded and started the car. Before he reversed out, I saw his long hand extend out of the window and I shook it, and Solomon shook it too.

  ‘Drive slowly and normally,’ I said and he reversed and headed out of the gates. The car on the street quickly followed and I breathed a little more easily. Then I turned and opened the boot to my old Peugeot, a car I had held on to for years since I’d been a poor lecturer. I had kept it so that Ruby could drive to the shops or taxi Solomon around. We drove in silence. I was checking my rear-view mirror, when I heard a soft sound and I looked at Solomon and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He was crying, looking ahead as if too scared to face me. ‘Solomon, don’t worry, we’re just . . . everything is fine, don’t cry.’ But he kept crying and said, ‘I am sorry, Father, is this my fault?’